Coping with Risk in Agriculture, 3rd Edition
Coping with Risk in Agriculture, 3rd Edition

Author: J Brian Hardaker

Publisher: CABI

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1780645740

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Risk and uncertainty are inescapable factors in agriculture which require careful management. Farmers face production risks from the weather, crop and livestock performance, and pests and diseases, as well as institutional, personal and business risks. This revised third edition of the popular textbook includes updated chapters on theory and methods and contains a new chapter discussing the state-contingent approach to the analysis of production and the use of copulas to better model stochastic dependency. Aiming to introduce agricultural decision making, probability and risk preference, this book is an indispensable guide for students and researchers of agriculture and agribusiness management.

Applied Decision Analysis
Applied Decision Analysis

Author: Francisco Javier Girón

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 9401707596

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Taking advantage of the many specialists visiting Spain prior to the INFORMS Meeting in Barcelona, hold from July 14th to July 17th 1997, we organized a work shop on Decision Analysis Applications at the Real Academia de Ciencias, Madrid, Spain, from J uly 11th to 12th 1997, under the sponsorship of de the Instituto Espaiia. This workshop had a precedent in the International Conference Decision Making: Towards the 21st Century also held at the Real Academia de Ciencias in 1993. The idea of organizing an event, this time devoted to applications of Decision Analysis, was due to Prof. Sixto Rfos, who some four years ago, .sponsored and encouraged by the Royal Academy of Sciences, was the creator of an Interdisciplinary Working Group on Decision Analysis -formed with researchers from within and outside this Academy- which has been active since then, organizing periodical meetings, and whose last project has tumed out into this Workshop. The workshop turned out to be an stimulating opportunity for communicating and discussing the enormous variety of applications of Decision Sciences. In this volume we have included most of the invited papers and a selection of refereed contributed papers. Due to the varied nature of the applications, we have grouped them into five groups ending, as way of an epilog, with a paper by Sarin which contains important insights and reftections on the nature of Decision Analysis in public and private sectors.

Advances in Decision Analysis
Advances in Decision Analysis

Author: Ward Edwards

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-07-23

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 9780521863681

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By framing issues, identifying risks, eliciting stakeholder preferences, and suggesting alternative approaches, decision analysts can offer workable solutions in domains such as the environment, health and medicine, engineering and operations research, and public policy. This book reviews and extends the material typically presented in introductory texts. Not a single book covers the broad scope of decision analysis at this advanced level. It will be a valuable resource for academics and students in decision analysis as well as decision analysts and managers

Foundations of Decision Analysis
Foundations of Decision Analysis

Author: Ronald A. Howard

Publisher:

Published: 2015-01-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780132336246

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For courses in Decision Making and Engineering. The Fundamentals of Analyzing and Making Decisions Foundations of Decision Analysis is a groundbreaking text that explores the art of decision making, both in life and in professional settings. By exploring themes such as dealing with uncertainty and understanding the distinction between a decision and its outcome, the First Edition teaches readers to achieve clarity of action in any situation. The book treats decision making as an evolutionary process from a scientific standpoint. Strategic decision-making analysis is presented as a tool to help students understand, discuss, and settle on important life choices. Through this text, readers will understand the specific thought process that occurs behind approaching any decision to make easier and better life choices for themselves.

Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Geographic Information Science
Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Geographic Information Science

Author: Jacek Malczewski

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-02-02

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 3540747575

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This book is intended for the GIS Science and Decision Science communities. It is primarily targeted at postgraduate students and practitioners in GIS and urban, regional and environmental planning as well as applied decision analysis. It is also suitable for those studying and working with spatial decision support systems. The main objectives of this book are to effectivley integrate Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) into Geographic Information Science (GIScience), to provide a comprehensive account of theories, methods, technologies and tools for tackling spatial decision problems and to demonstrate how the GIS-MCDA approaches can be used in a wide range of planning and management situations.

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis via Ratio and Difference Judgement
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis via Ratio and Difference Judgement

Author: Freerk A. Lootsma

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-08-23

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0585280088

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The point of departure in the present book is that the decision makers, involved in the evaluation of alternatives under conflicting criteria, express their preferential judgement by estimating ratios of subjective values or differences of the corresponding logarithms, the so-called grades. Three MCDA methods are studied in detail: the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique SMART, as well as the Additive and the Multiplicative AHP, both pairwise-comparison methods which do not suffer from the well-known shortcomings of the original Analytic Hierarchy Process. Context-related preference modelling on the basis of psycho-physical research in visual perception and motor skills is extensively discussed in the introductory chapters. Thereafter many extensions of the ideas are presented via case studies in university administration, health care, environmental assessment, budget allocation, and energy planning at the national and the European level. The issues under consideration are: group decision making with inhomogeneous power distributions, the search for a compromise solution, resource allocation and fair distributions, scenario analysis in long-term planning, conflict analysis via the pairwise comparison of concessions, and multi-objective optimization. The final chapters are devoted to the fortunes of MCDA in the hands of its designers. The research started in the late seventies, when I got involved in three different problems: the nomination procedures in a university, the evaluation of alternative energy-research proposals, and the evaluation of non-linear programming software.

Bayesian Decision Analysis
Bayesian Decision Analysis

Author: Jim Q. Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-09-23

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1139491113

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Bayesian decision analysis supports principled decision making in complex domains. This textbook takes the reader from a formal analysis of simple decision problems to a careful analysis of the sometimes very complex and data rich structures confronted by practitioners. The book contains basic material on subjective probability theory and multi-attribute utility theory, event and decision trees, Bayesian networks, influence diagrams and causal Bayesian networks. The author demonstrates when and how the theory can be successfully applied to a given decision problem, how data can be sampled and expert judgements elicited to support this analysis, and when and how an effective Bayesian decision analysis can be implemented. Evolving from a third-year undergraduate course taught by the author over many years, all of the material in this book will be accessible to a student who has completed introductory courses in probability and mathematical statistics.

Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Supporting the Selection of Engineering Materials in Product Design
Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Supporting the Selection of Engineering Materials in Product Design

Author: Ali Jahan

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0081005415

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Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Supporting the Selection of Engineering Materials in Product Design, Second Edition, provides readers with tactics they can use to optimally select materials to satisfy complex design problems when they are faced with the vast range of materials available. Current approaches to materials selection range from the use of intuition and experience, to more formalized computer-based methods, such as electronic databases with search engines to facilitate the materials selection process. Recently, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods have been applied to materials selection, demonstrating significant capability for tackling complex design problems. This book describes the rapidly growing field of MCDM and its application to materials selection. It aids readers in producing successful designs by improving the decision-making process. This new edition updates and expands previous key topics, including new chapters on materials selection in the context of design problem-solving and multiple objective decision-making, also presenting a significant amount of additional case studies that will aid in the learning process. - Describes the advantages of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in the materials selection process through different case studies - Presents a methodology for multi-objective material design optimization that employs Design of Experiments coupled with Finite Element Analysis - Supplements existing quantitative methods of materials selection by allowing simultaneous consideration of design attributes, component configurations, and types of material - Provides a case study for simultaneous materials selection and geometrical optimization processes

Decision Making Under Uncertainty
Decision Making Under Uncertainty

Author: Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0262331713

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An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.